Nerds

I have not set foot in a grocery store in years. Nevermore will I bumble through endless confusing aisles like a pack-donkey searching for feed while the smell of rotting flesh fills my nostrils and fluorescent lights sear my eyeballs and sappy love songs torture my ears. Grocery shopping is a multisensory living nightmare. There are services that will make someone else do it for me but I cannot in good conscience force a fellow soul through this gauntlet.

Hopefully you wrote down the terms of that loan as a contract. However, the authors of laws and the writers of contracts face a special kind of challenge. Ideally, there should never be any confusion about the meaning of the agreement. But laws are written with words, and words are famously imprecise.

So these are big problems with traditional law. Agreements are ambiguous. And enforcement is hard.

Ethereum solves both these problems. It does this with the marriage of two special ingredients: a digital currency, and a complete programming language. Let’s look at both.